BRATTLEBORO — Thanks to the wonders of interlibrary loan, I'm reading The Place No One Knew, a 1963 Sierra Club book by photographer Eliot Porter, about the incomparable Glen Canyon in Utah just before it was flooded and lost forever, thanks to U.S. Department of the Interior and the thirst of white people in the southwest and California.
The book is a series of magnificent photographs opposite memorable quotations. One of these, by famed Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, particularly struck me:
“Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars, and the hills as well as with his neighbors. Being in tune with the apartment or the community is part of the secret. Being in tune with the universe is the entire secret. Man's greatest mission is to preserve life, not to destroy it. When the land becomes the symbol of sterility and poverty, when the wonders of creation have been destroyed, youth has no place to go but the alleys, and a blight lies across the land.”
He meant, of course, all life, not simply a single species of the millions that share the Earth.
Imagine the disgustingly greedy, morally stunted inhabitants of today's Supreme Court writing or thinking such noble thoughts. Inconceivable!
The youth are indeed in alleys, shooting fentanyl if they're not purchasing AK-47s, and there is indeed blight across the land: the blight of militarism, of big ag that is steadily, relentlessly depleting the aquifers and destroying the fertile bounty that was once ours, of the mass, demented fascination with big cars and tiny screens....
We have to organize, and we have to vote. But sometimes it's hard, damned hard.